I am interested in where channel and individual conversations are stored. We would like to ensure we can discover / store these for compliance. If we cannot find these conversations then it would utlimately limited the use of such an excellent group of services.

We use Office 365 separate services extensively and each individually we are happy with but this merging and not knowing where conversations are kept is a big concern.

I've been trying to find this hidden folder in a group Mailbox. How can I access it and get access to the content of it (I would like to see if it is possible to move those conversations to another team on the same tenant)

And to clarify for anyone with Exchange on-prem using Teams through the hybrid connector. According to the documentation, private chats are not available through the compliance tools because there is no related EXO mailbox. However, a customer has proven that these conversations are captured and findable through the compliance tools within the Teams chat service.

@Matthew_Skaj Are you asking me where it says that Exchange Server conversations are NOT captured? If so, the Teams and Exchange documentation does not say, explicitly, that these conversations are not captured -- my point was that there was a gap in the documentation about what happened in this scenario.

Unfortunately, I've not watched for updates on this topic since last summer, but at that point there was no documentation on this anomaly. As I stated then, this client was able to track down the conversations within the comms service and was discoverable using the Compliance tools. I did not replicate the issue, so I do not have any further detail, but the product team did acknowledge this gap and said that they were working on a long-term solution.

@Christian Buckley Thanks for getting back to me. It's maddening how often MS changes things in O365 without having their documentation updated to reflect the current environment. I still can't find an answer as to why hundreds of our employees chat messages in Teams recently started disappearing after 30 days. We haven't had any issues since we rolled it out 18 months ago and haven't made any retention policy changes at all since March. This just started mid July. I thought it might be because we don't have EOL turned on for everyone yet and chat histories are supposed to be store there. But where are they stored for people who don't have EOL? Where are those default retention settings located?

@Matthew_Skaj Your assumption sounds logical -- because your Exchange Server users do not have an EOL account, their conversations are not being stored in a place where they can be properly managed, archived, etc. According to the documentation last summer, the result is that the compliance tools cannot locate and manage these conversations. However, a customer org was able to locate these "disjointed" Server user conversations captured/stored within the comms service itself, and then work with them through the compliance tools. However, it makes sense that because these conversations are not where they should be, there is some regular (monthly?) sweep of these irregularities, which may be why you;re losing them. Again, this is pure speculation, but it makes sense -- and might be where you spend some time looking.

What the Teams engineering org shared last year -- and confirmed that we could share with clients (not under NDA) was that the long-term solution would be to auto-create EOL accounts for each of these server-based users, closing this gap. They offered no timeline, and I'm not sure what kind of progress was made, but again....it's a path for you to investigate.